to do. I was walking away toward town with visions of buying something good to eat, and this
older white boy I knew, Richard Dixon, came up and asked me if I wanted to match nickels. He
had plenty of change for my dollar. In about a half hour, he had all the change back, including my
dollar, and instead of going to town to buy something, I went home with nothing, and I was bitter.
But that was nothing compared to what I felt when I found out later that he had cheated. There is
a way that you can catch and hold the nickel and make it come up the way you want. This was
my first lesson about gambling: if you see somebody winning all the time, he isn't gambling, he's
cheating. Later on in life, if I were continuously losing in any gambling situation, I would watch
very closely. It's like the Negro in America seeing the white man win all the time. He's a
professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always
dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck.
About this time, my mother began to be visited by some Seventh Day Adventists who had moved
into a house not too far down the road from us. Theywould talk to her for hours at a time, and
leave booklets and leaflets and magazines for her to read. She read them, and Wilfred, who had
started back to school after we had begun to get the relief food supplies, also read a lot. His head
was forever in some book.
Before long, my mother spent much time with the Adventists. It's my belief that what mostly
influenced her was that they had even more diet restrictions than she always had taught and
practiced with us. Like us, they were against eating rabbit and pork; they followed the Mosaic
dietary laws. They ate nothing of the flesh without a split hoof, or that didn't chew a cud. We
began to go with my mother to the Adventist meetings that were held further out in the country.
For us children, I know that the major attraction was the good food they served. But we listened,
too. There were a handful of Negroes, from small towns in the area, but I would say that it was
ninety-nine percent white people. The Adventists felt that we were living at the end of time, that
the world soon was coming to an end. But they were the friendliest white people I had ever seen.
In some ways, though, we children noticed, and, when we were back at home, discussed, that
they were different from us-such as the lack of enough seasoning in their food, and the different
way that white people smelled.
Meanwhile, the state Welfare people kept after my mother. By now, she didn't make it any secret
that she hated them, and didn't want them in her house. But they exerted their right to come, and
I have many, many times reflected upon how, talking to us children, they began to plant the seeds
of division in our minds. They would ask such things as who was smarter than the other. And they
would ask me why I was "so different."
I think they felt that getting children into foster homes was a legitimate pan of their function, and
the result would be less troublesome, however they went about it.
And when my mother fought them, they went after her-first, through me. I was the first target. I
stole; that implied that I wasn't being taken care of by my mother.
All of us were mischievous at some time or another, I more so than any of the rest. Philbert and I
kept a battle going. And this was just one of a dozen things that kept building up the pressure on
my mother.
I'm not sure just how or when the idea was first dropped by the Welfare workers that our mother
was losing her mind.
But I can distinctly remember hearing "crazy" applied to her by them when they learned that the
Negro fanner who was in the next house down the road from us had offered to give us some
butchered pork-a whole pig, maybe even two of them-and she had refused. We all heard them
call my mother "crazy" to her face for refusing good meat. It meant nothing to them even when
she explained that we had never eaten pork, that it was against her religion as a Seventh Day
Adventist.
They were as vicious as vultures. They had no feelings, understanding, compassion, or respect
for my mother. They told us, "She's crazy for refusing food." Right then was when our home, our
unity, began to disintegrate. We were having a hard time, and I wasn't helping. But we could have
made it, we could have stayed together. As bad as I was, as much trouble and worry as I caused